Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ Jacobite army in 1746, four brothers from the Mackenzie clan hid in this remote corner from the savage reprisals.

      When speaking to any of Joe’s Scottish relatives, I sometimes feel I am wandering in a fog of confusion: the same Christian names recur throughout the generations. But to compound my bewilderment the Gillies relatives I met weren’t always related to Joe’s grandmother, Jane Gillies. When Jane moved to Bonar Bridge at the start of the twentieth century, she married David Mackenzie – Jane did not pass on until Joe was fourteen. The Mackenzies form a large extended family. Anna Mackenzie, who was born 13 January 1915 and married Ron Mellor in 1949, was one of nine brothers and sisters. At the wake I spoke to Sheena Yeats, one of Joe’s eighteen cousins: the two women who gave eulogies at the funeral were Maeri, who works for the BBC, and Anna, a teacher, the sister of Iain, Rona and Alasdair Gillies, who were especially close to Joe.

      It was amidst the wood-panelled surrounds of Carbisdale Castle that, three weeks before he died, Joe Strummer spent his last night at Bonar Bridge – on 30 November 2002, St Andrew’s Night, at the wedding banquet of cousin George to his partner Fiona. Folded in his pocket Joe had a copy of the family tree that his cousin Anna Gillies had drawn up. From time to time he would put down his ever-present can of cider and pull out the chart as another of his countless relatives hove into view; and he would show his willowy blonde wife Lucinda how this person fitted into his life.

      Joe and Lucinda had rented a car at Inverness train station. Disdaining to take the new, faster motorway, he had driven over the highland route of the Struie, which he loved for its wildness and fabulous views of the Dornoch firth, past the inn on the road that is open all night and which serves soup and haggis until seven in the morning. ‘That’s the only way you can come,’ he would say. Arriving in Bonar Bridge that afternoon he and Luce had taken a room at the Dunrobin pub on the high street to rest up: ‘He seemed so healthy, so debonair, relaxed, healthy and fit, and young,’ said Alasdair Gillies, who was five years younger. ‘I remember saying, “You look younger than me.”’ ‘He was in good shape,’ confirmed his aunt Jessie, his mother’s younger sister, and the only surviving female amongst her siblings. Aunt Jenny, who had been married to the late David Mackenzie, one of Joe’s mother’s three younger brothers, thought Joe looked ‘terribly tired’, though she added ‘but they hadn’t eaten and were starving’.

      At the wedding party at Carbisdale Castle Joe was fascinated by the traditional Scottish melodies of the Carach Showband, and spent time talking with the piper. At Carbisdale Castle Joe was distressed to find that an LP sleeve of the Bonar Bridge Pipe Band, on which the cover photograph showed the musicians posing outside the castle, contained no record inside it: writing down its details he vowed to trace the LP and get hold of a copy. ‘Unfortunately he didn’t have time,’ said Alasdair.

      Fiona, George’s bride, and two of her friends sang unaccompanied versions of Gaelic songs at the party. ‘I looked over at Joe and he was in tears,’ recalled Alasdair. ‘A few minutes later he was saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could get twelve of those tunes and put them on a CD.” I was very moved. He said, “You don’t get songs like that now: they last forever.”’ Lucinda had mentioned that in New York on Tartan Day the previous April Joe had insisted on marching all the way up Fifth Avenue, determined to see the pipe bands, and again he had been so moved that tears had run down his face. To the amusement of some of his relatives, Joe and Luce danced their own, not very accurate versions of the Highland ‘Skip the Reel’.

      The following day, Joe visited a property called West Airdens, a croft with a startling view that belonged to his aunt Jessie and her shepherd husband Ken, an extraordinary house that seemed magical to Joe. When he learnt that Jessie and her husband Ken had decided it was time to move down to Bonar Bridge, Joe made an instant decision: ‘Let’s buy it now, all of us, all the cousins.’ ‘“For each according to his means,” he said,’ Alasdair remembered, ‘quoting Marx. I said, “What would Engels say?” And he laughed. “What would Jessie say?” I wondered. “She’ll be up for it,” said Joe. Then it was 5 p.m., and he had to go the station.’

      Joe was already a day late. He had to be in Rockfield studio in South Wales, where he was to record his next album with The Mescaleros. But he had learnt something that was strongly drawing him back to Bonar Bridge: that day, 1 December, was the birthday of Uncle John Mackenzie, the brother of Anna, his mother, and the man Joe always called ‘the original punk rocker’. As he grew older Joe Strummer felt close to all his Bonar Bridge relatives, but Uncle John held a special meaning for him and touched his heart. Johnny Mellor was even christened after Uncle John. ‘In a perfect world, I wouldn’t go home,’ he stated. ‘Uncle John told me he’s 77 today. In a perfect world I’d go to the Dunrobin for the evening. Maybe I could go back tomorrow.’ ‘He knew he had to go,’ said Alasdair, ‘but didn’t want to. But at the last minute, he said, “I’d better go. In a perfect world, I’d stay. But this is not a perfect world.”’ (When we call round, Uncle John pours us each ‘a wee dram’ of the Irish whiskey that Joe had despatched up to him as a birthday gift as soon as he arrived at Rockfield.)

      Minutes into Joe and Luce’s hour-long drive to Inverness station, he phoned Alasdair, fired up with enthusiasm, reminding him they had to buy the house. Moments later he called again, repeating this insistence, and – filled with the emotion of the weekend – reminding his cousin he would waste no time in tracking down the LP by the Bonar Bridge Pipe Band. ‘The Bonar Bridge magnetism holds you: you don’t want to go back to the city. On his last visit Joe exhibited all the symptoms of that condition. Then he phoned me at the station, saying he had made it, and we’d sort out the house. “Love to all,” he said. And that was the last time I saw him. The next thing I knew I got a call from Amanda Temple, the wife of Julien Temple, the film director, who lived near him in Somerset, three weeks later.

      ‘But those two days we were with him, I felt he’d reached a new level, reconciled both his father’s side and his mother’s Highland stuff. He was being restored to his rightful place in the bosom of the family, onwards and upwards. And it was very hard to bear, when he died.’

      Sitting in his favourite armchair by the window of the living-room in the sturdy family croft of Carnmhor in Bonar Bridge, Uncle John speaks with the same lilting Highlands accent that Joe’s mother Anna never lost. ‘Johnny first came here when he was under a year. They were just back from Turkey, and came up by train.’ At one moment on the first of these fortnight-long visits to Bonar Bridge, the toddler Johnny Mellor was found standing at the top of Carnmhor’s steep stairs, shouting in Turkish for someone to carry him down them as there was no banister rail. Upstairs at Carnmhor, the bedroom in which John and his brother David stayed had big brass bedsteads, hard mattresses and bolsters. The two boys were always collectively referred to by the family as David-and-Johnny, like fish’n’chips, or Morecambe-and-Wise, or – perhaps more appositely – like rock’n’roll.

      With his young nephew, uncle John Mackenzie shared certain characteristics which only increased as Johnny matured into the figure of Joe Strummer. In his almost Australian aboriginal tendency to go ‘walkabout’, Uncle John predicted behaviour that many people connected with Joe were obliged to accept: the most public example of this was his famous vanishing act in 1982 before a Clash US tour. Uncle John had that same ability to disappear. In the early 1940s, ‘Bonnie John’ – as he was known in his youth – vanished for several weeks. Assuming he was dead, Jane Mackenzie, his mother, went to bed for a fortnight. Eventually he was discovered in Inverness.

      After that first visit to Bonar Bridge it was seven years (‘a long while,’ said John, with sadness in his voice) before the Mellor family returned to Anna’s home. On each of the annual visits his family paid to Bonar Bridge between 1960 and 1963, Johnny Mellor liked nothing better than running after Uncle John and his tractor. ‘David was about nine, Johnny was about seven,’ John remembered of that next visit. ‘Johnny was a very cheery, happy boy. He would just wander around the place. He was very fond of being outside. He was a young boy full of life. He did СКАЧАТЬ